Samsung Galaxy S8 Review

Samsung Galaxy S8

Design

8/10

Features

10/10

Performance

9/10

Camera

8/10

Battery

9/10

Pros

Awesome display

feels like the future

Stunning camera

It’s actually innovative

Cons

Awfully placed fingerprint sensor

Bixby is a bit of a dud

In 2014Samsungmade a surprise product announcement called the Galaxy Note edge with this crazy edge display and unexpectedly it got a lot of attention.Since then that product has evolved again and again into Samsung’s entire flagship lineup which brings us to the galaxy S8.

This new phone looks awesome and that’s a hallmark headlining feature is ‘how good it looks’ and how well it is designed and then of course being a flagship it has all the bleeding-edge specs inside and the hardware you’d expect from a premium Android phone. So this phone is somewhat like a Ultimate Smartphone.

I’ll strat the review with the phone’s build. Pretty much everything about the outside of this phone is premium and well built and awesome. The display up front sort of melts over both sides and it does so smoothly into the back frame while last year’s phone did it more sharply and if you want to talk about modern or about the future of smart phone design. Now the best part of these super thin bezels on all sides is that the footprint of the phone shrinks a lot so the 5.8 inch and 6.2inch displays respectively on the s8 and s8 plus don’t feel like huge phones even though they have huge screen.

For S8 I think it is a great size because it’s so narrow and anyone with regular hands can reach across to the other side of this display just maybe not all the way up to the top .I think the best indicator for this is the fingerprint sensor obviously there’s no more room to put it up at the front of the phones so they moved it around to the back but instead of putting it somewhere in the middle of the back. But they put it right up there next to the camera.I think the top fingerprint sensor might look a little bit better in some cases but it is definitely harder to reach.This makes S8 a two hand phone.

Currently galaxy S8 holds the best industrial design of any smartphone and a long time in my opinion even though there are other phones out now and coming soon that do the tall display thin bezels thing you still got to add on all metal and glass still has expandable storage through a micro SD card slot still fully water and dust resistant , ip68 certified, so you can spill water on it and it’s cool ,it has USB type-c with quick charge ,has wireless charging ,the headphone jack and the speaker is below average and downward facing . It might be the worst part of the phones build but hat comes with the territory when there’s no room on the front. The phone again is extremely bright so it’s visible outdoors or whenever and it’s an OLED , so of course it has fantastic color and contrast ratios and dynamic range and it’s super high resolution too.Not every app in the App Store fills the display right now. Lot of games especially will have to be updated or may just never fully support that, so you’ll either have the black bars on either side.

I think the screen is awesome and with its curved edges and curved corners I’m a fan and then there is the inside of the phone and since this is a flagship Samsung is again pushing things to the highest end of what’s available except for one particular area , but there’s some pretty high-end specs in here Snapdragon 835 , a dream of 540 GPU , 4 gigabytes of RAM , 64 gigs ofstorage which like we said is expandable and this is the first phone to ship with Bluetooth 5.0.

Department of the Galaxy s8 is called Bixby , you may have heard of it it’s the virtual assistant that’s built for this phone that just does a lot of what Google assistant does. Now the circumstances surrounding it are interesting because Samsung put a dedicated button on the side of the phone just for launching it a big speed button , now a lot of people didn’t like this for fair reason whether they didn’t like Bixby or didn’t want it. So they found a way to use an app to remap the Dixie button to do whatever they want . Probably should have been in the Samsung settings in the first place. Understandably again people got kind of angry about that nobody wants accidental triggers of the app they want to never use.

The Galaxy S8 has a 12-megapixel camera, just like the S7 does. But it’s better. I took side by-side images with the S7 and S8 in a variety of modes, and the S8’s pictures are clearer and brighter, with more detail and less artifacting. While the S8 doesn’t have dual main cameras, there’s a software-based Selective Focus mode to create bokeh, and a pretty good Pro mode that includes Raw capture and manual shutter speed.Both cameras record video as well, of course, to true 4K with the main camera, and 2,560-by-1,440 with the front camera, both at 30fps in all circumstances. There’s also a 60fps 1080p (barely) slow-mo option. The main camera has OIS and the front camera doesn’t, but in general, they’re both excellent video cameras, much as the S7’s was as well.

The Galaxy S8 is the most luxurious, best performing phone on the market right now. It’s on fire, and I don’t mean that literally. Maybe it’s more phone than most people need. But it’s almost certainly better than the phone you have.

REVIEW OVERVIEW

Design

8.4

Features

9.5

Performance

9.2

Camera

8.3

Battery

9.1

SUMMARY

The Samsung Galaxy S8's fast speeds and fantastic curved screen make it a top phone for 2017, but the annoying fingerprint reader could sour your experience.

Founder of Troied , Vishnuprasad AS is a programmer , web developer and the CCO of Motify.in . He writes mainly about technology , internet and tech related tutorials. He is currently doing his engineers degree in Computer Science from Vidya Academy of Science & Technology.

3 COMMENTS

This phone is overhyped. It has a bad fingerprint scanner placement, unfinished Bixby software, lag already even with SD835 meaning it is not optimized, a camera that takes good but not the best photos, so battery life when set to QHD (as it should be instead of a default FHD….such rubbish). Then Android people complain Apple is only using FHD yet do not care when Samsung defaults to FHD or would have slammed LG if the fingerprint scanner were badly placed or if the battery was small. So much double standards. Besides the looks and good screen, there is nothing noteworthy about this phone.